Welcome to the Harbor Unitarian Universalist Congregation

When I was a child my mother always came to say good-night after I was in bed. She would tuck in the covers, read me a story, and then we recited the classic child's good night prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

My childhood idea of God was like most of us who attended Christian main line churches. God took care of us. God could be petitioned. God was also a judge, who kept an eye on what we were doing. God was the father of Jesus, who loved little children. And so forth.

Most of us moved out of this stage of faith. Most of us rebelled against the Great Father in the Sky model of God. Most of us in this room moved away from Christianity. And we looked for something else, because if we have nothing larger than our self to idolize, we have what some have called "a god-sized hole in our hearts." We found divinity in a different place, and sometimes we named it a different name.

I left my childhood faith when it failed to answer my questions. For many years I was mostly unchurched, although my reading kept me in a tenuous connection with religion. When I walked into the Unitarian Universalist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, I found the religious community for which I had been unconsciously searching.

My definition of the divine is now very different from my childhood, and it is a moving target. It is based in humanism, informed by feminist understandings, fed by my connection to the natural world and enriched by process theology. When I try to encapsulate this in words, I come up with the phrases you have often heard--Spirit of Life and Love, God of Many Names and Many Nations, Creator and Sustainer of Life.

Our hearts yearn toward love; the love of one specific human, the love of family and friends, and the love of that undefined, nebulous something that we sometimes call God. Where the Heart Is, our topic for today.

The Reverend Forrest Church is minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. He is also an author of numerous books; a biography of his father, Utah Senator Frank Church, The Devil and Dr. Church, The Seven Deadly Virtues, and with the Rev. John Buehrens, the classic book we give to all new members, A Chosen Faith. His newest book is Bringing God Home, and it inspired my sermon today.

It is, he says, a traveler's guide. It draws upon his spiritual journey, but also upon other writers who have preceded him. The guide shows us where he has been on his journey, and how he got to where he is now. His hope is that it can pro-vide a model for others on a similar journey. (Church, Forrest, Bringing God Home, St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 2002, p. 4)

Church acknowledges that by most standards he was a successful man. He married and fathered children. He graduated from a prestigious school, Harvard. He was called to the pulpit of a large and very public church in our largest city. He wrote books that received good reviews and sold well. He frequently ap-peared on nation-wide TV shows to talk about his books, and to give the liberal religious perspective on issues. However, he says, there was a "hollowness" in his life. (Ibid, p. 6.)

He learned, he says, that "when we don't believe in God, its not that we believe in nothing; rather we believe in almost anything." And he tells of believing in a string of smaller gods, "all of which failed me." (Ibid.)

Church never defines God completely. He does not understand his task as tell-ing his readers the identity or characteristics or appearance of God. Rather, he lets the simple three-letter word with which English-speakers have been obsess-ed for centuries stand as a metaphor. I use it that way today. I ask you to under-stand it as a metaphor for your conception of the Divine.

For many of you that will be the best and brightest that lies within the human heart. For many of you that will be something larger--outside humanity. It is the yearning, the love, of which we speak today; not the futile attempt of humans to define that which is indefinable.

Church's thesis, with which I agree, is that we humans need to relate to some-thing larger than ourselves. In our search for meaning, we need to seek a relationship with that which we name as Divine. If we fail to do so, we experi-ence the hollowness that Church named, or a God-sized hole in our heart as others express it. Because we yearn for completion, we will find something else to which we give our love. Church admits that, for a decade at least, alcohol filled that hole for him. (Ibid p. 7) For some it may be a career that receives ultimate loyalty. For others it may be another human, or their larger family. For some it may be a nation-state that receives their love and adoration. These are substitute gods.

The three forms of love I mentioned earlier, Eros, Filia, and Agape, were defined by the Greeks centuries ago. The first, Eros, is romantic, or passionate love. This is the love that we most commonly celebrate on Valentine's Day. When we say the word love, eros is often what we mean. Eros is fun, exciting, pleasur-able, and sometimes painful. Eros is what encourages the human race to repro-duce successfully. Eros connects us with each other in deep and loving relation-ships. Eros encourages its partners to heights of nobility, and sometimes to depths of foolishness. It can bring us transcendent moments of togetherness, and the depths of despair when the loved one dies. It is necessary, meaningful and holy.

According to the ancient Greeks, the second form of love is filia, or brotherly love. We might term this affectionate love for family and friends. It is the love we feel for the younger brother who drove you crazy when you were a teen-ager, but surprisingly grew to be an adult whose company you enjoy. It is the deep attach-ment that exists between parents and children. It is the affection present be-tween friends who shared kindergarten, middle school and high school gradua-tion. It is present between neighbors who share long years of child-rearing and the appearance of grandchildren. It is there in the casseroles that appear when a death strikes a family. Filial love is deep and loyal; it is sometimes disappointed and often joyous. It is necessary, meaningful, and holy.

And the last form of love is Agape, divine love. Agape love is a yearning love for something greater. Our hearts yearn toward the best and brightest in and around us. We yearn toward completion, wholeness. We yearn toward the one human who will share our life, we yearn toward other humans who provide us with com-panionship, and we yearn toward the something larger that will fill the hollowness we experience when we remember that we are finite humans in an unimaginably large cosmos.

One way we express this is to say that we love God, and that God loves us in return. Few of us image the divine as a being that experiences emotions similar to humans. However, we may say that we believe that we "live in a Benign Universe," as did one minister. We may hold in our hearts a personification of our world as an ever-fruitful Mother Earth. We may think of God as the process of Creation, in which we participate, and name that good. Agape love is neces-sary, meaningful and holy.

Church tells us that we need all three forms of love in our lives, lest we raise idols to worship that betray us. He retells the story of David and Bathsheba as a warn-ing against allowing eros to take precedence over filia and agape. (Ibid, 111.)

David, the king of Israel, watched Bathsheba, wife of Uriah, one of David's generals, as she bathed on her rooftop on a moonlit night. David exerted his royal power and had Bathsheba brought to his room. Before the night was over, Bathsheba was pregnant.

When she informed David of this inconvenient fact, he sent for Uriah, who was away fighting the Philistines. When he returned David suggested that his loyal general, for whom he should have felt filial affection, spend the night with his wife. However, Uriah had taken an oath to forbear from such comfort until his sovereign and his nation was safe from the Philistines. Fully armed, he lay down across the doorway to David's room to ensure his safety. Even after David plied him with wine, Uriah remained steadfast.

When David sent him back to the front, Uriah carried with him a message to his commander to put Uriah in the front of the battle, and withdraw that he might be slain. He did so, and Bathsheba became one of David's several wives. David betrayed filial love in the service of eros.

Nathan the prophet challenged him with his infidelity through the use of a par-able, causing David to recognize that he had also betrayed his God. Eros had caused him to betray agape love. Powerful eros must be balanced with filial and agape love. Those who successfully balance all three types of love are complete and whole.

And where do we find agape love? Church uses several examples to tell us that we find love right at home. He quotes Rumi, from Pilgrims on the Way:

Pilgrims on the Way! Where are you?
Here is the beloved, here!
Your beloved lives next door
wall to wall
why do you wander
round and round the desert?
If you look in the face of Love
and not just at its superficial form
you yourselves become the house of God and are its lords.

It is when we stop seeking in foreign places and unfamiliar faiths that we find the meaning for which we are searching. It is when we seek right at home, within our selves that we find the Divine.

Church retells the story of the Hasidic Rabbi Isaac of Cracow.

One night Rabbi Isaac had a dream. In it, God tells him to leave his home and travel to Prague. There, beneath the bridge, he will find a great treas-ure. Isaac is far from superstitious, but this is the third time the dream has recurred. So Isaac sets out on the long journey to Prague. Exhausted, he finally arrives at the bridge underneath which the promised treasure is reportedly buried. But soldiers guard the bridge day and night, and Isaac cannot dig for the treasure without attracting their attention. Hours pass and then days. At last, abandoning all hope, he turns to leave, empty-handed. As he walks away, a soldier calls to him, "Old man, for the longest time you've been hanging about, and now you are leaving. What strange quest brought you here, and why do you now go?"

"I had a dream," Isaac confesses. "God told me to go to Prague, where I would find a great treasure buried beneath the bridge."

"Fool," the soldier replies. "I once had such a dream. God told me that if I went to Cracow and looked up Rabbi Isaac, I too would find a great treasure, buried beneath his stove."

Thanking the soldier, Rabbi Isaac returns home to find his promised treasure where it always was, hidden under his own hearth. (Ibid. p.9)

"The key," says Church, "to spiritual fulfillment is always in our pocket. By no accident, this same key unlocks our hearts." (Ibid)

If you would seek love, agape love, look at home within your own heart. It is far less important to correctly classify your understanding of the Divine, than it is to experience Love, the love of that which is larger than the self or your partner, your family, or your nation. It is by growing your own heart that you find agape love.

Life on this earth is short, and we humans are both blessed and cursed with the knowledge that it will cease. Church charges us to live fully while we have life. He reminds us of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the protesting pastor in Germany who knew of the plot against Hitler's life, and did not warn him. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death. While awaiting his execution he wrote a letter to his fiancee, Maria von Wedemeyer-Weller, just before Christmas, 1944:

These will be quiet days in our homes. But I have had the experience over and over again that the quieter it is around me, the clearer do I feel the con-nection to you. It is as though in solitude the soul develops senses that we hardly know in everyday life. Therefore I have not felt lonely or abandoned for one moment. You, the parents, all of you, the friends and students of mine at the front, all are constantly present to me. Your prayers and good thoughts, words from the Bible, discussion long past, pieces of music and books--(all these) gain life and reality as never before. It is a great invisible sphere in which one lives and in whose reality there is no doubt. … Therefore you must not think I am unhappy. What is happiness and un-happiness? It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends really only on that which happens inside a person. I am grateful every day that I have you, and that makes me happy. (Ibid. 116)

Bonhoeffer had learned to live fully while he yet had life; and he had learned that love and happiness was found within his own heart.

Living fully in the present allows one to engage with love, eros, filial and agape. And it is in love, in relationships, that we find our meaning and our satisfaction.

Go now, to your homes. Search within for the love that makes you whole, for the love that gives meaning to your life. Love with passion, love with affection, love with yearning. And may your days be rich and satisfying upon this earth.

Amen.
Blessed Be.
Shalom.
Saalat.